History Quotes

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

Western history has been a history of deed done, actions performed and results achieved.

In all her history, from the formation of the federal government until the hour of secession, no year stands out more prominently than the year 1858 as evidencing the national patriotism of Virginia.

The ability of Americans to toss off oppressive characters is the most rewarding aspect, to me, of U.S. history.

History offers no evidence for the proposition that the assignment of women to military combat jobs is the way to win wars, improve combat readiness, or promote national security.

As I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics.

The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

Governments that use violence to stop democratic development will not earn themselves respite forever. They will pay an increasingly high price for actions which they can no longer hide from the world with ease, and will find themselves on the wrong side of history.

The great and abiding lesson of American history, particularly the cold war, is that the engine of capitalism, the individual, is mightier than any collective.

The most important thing I learned as a foreign correspondent in about 80 countries is that it takes a very shallow knowledge of history to think that there are solutions to most problems.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

Today, for the first time in history, a Bishop of Rome sets foot on English soil. This fair land, once a distant outpost of the pagan world, has become, through the preaching of the Gospel, a beloved and gifted portion of Christ's vineyard.

Tell the FBI that the kidnappers should pick out a judge that Nixon wants back.

I'm not going to say that every record I've put out was the greatest record in history, but I'd stand by even the bad ones. Don't make excuses, make hits.

But the history of the changes produced by a universal idea is not a history of changes in the individual, but of changes brought about by the successive efforts of millions of individuals in the course of many generations.

The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world, there's only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease, I think, is gonna be guinea worm.

World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.

One of the most amazing developments in the history of biology.

All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.

We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.

When the rich think about the poor, they have poor ideas.

The odds are always against you no matter what your previous history is. You have to overcome the tendency to relax.

So many struggled so that all of us could have a voice in this great democracy and live up to the first three words of our constitution: We the people. I love that phrase so much. Throughout our country's history, we've expanded the meaning of that phrase to include more and more of us. That's what it means to move forward.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

Oh, do not read history, for that I know must be false.

Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is insufficient: the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations, and the people with whom it came into contact, must be considered.

I don't know the history of my sport. I'm not like those people who know everything.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.